Change and Hope – ($2700/family/year)

So I’ve got the rest of the health care news for this year. We’re looking at an 18 percent increase, our previous plan was dropped because it didn’t make sense for the insurance carrier to have different rules for different companies and we have several added coverages which we didn’t need.

– Pediatric vision and dental care are apparently mandatory parts of health care. The vision and dental coverage is weak but we already pay for that on another plan so it’s only extra cost from our perspective. Why aren’t vision and dental part of your health? I often wonder how that got divided out in the first place.

– Obesity surgery is covered now, but only partially, I didn’t know it wasn’t before. It sounds easier than dieting!

– You can have as much drug rehab as you like apparently.

– No maximum out of pocket limits but they were like 5 million already, and usually if you have that kind of expense, your work insurance is no longer practical. I like this change in particular.

There are a few others but that’s about it though.

Excepting the massive cost increase, it isn’t much different for in network coverage. Out-of-network, our deductibles went up 2X but the network is the biggest and it is almost hard to go out of it. The net increase (not reduction in cost per Obama’s repeated prognostication) on a family of four was about $2700/year. In a 40 employee company, three thousand here, couple thousand there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.

I do wonder if any government officials were actually dumb enough to believe that insurance carriers wouldn’t drop the old non-complying products when even a mild cost increase would force them to. Of those who were in charge of this ‘change and hope’ plan, I wonder how many would admit they knew.

26 Responses to “Change and Hope – ($2700/family/year)”

I don’t think we should assume incompetence when we are flatly told that single payer insurance is the short-term goal.

Make a mess, collapse it financially over time and offer the single payer government insurance as the solution. If the size of the mess is manageable yet problematic enough that a solution is still required, they achieve their goal of providing the next solution.

It isn’t actually that hard to conceive of. What most leftists that I have met don’t recognize is that once the best possible medical insurance situation is achieved, then we get to have the emergencies of coverage and discussions of who will pay. Conservative minded folks are generally completely aware of that particular future by their nature. Government emergencies, by definition, have no end. The more the better — if you work for government.

While I subscribe to Mark Twain’s philosophy, the fact that Obama and his toadies in the press are now trying to spin it that he did NOT say that (just like he never said ” you did not build that”) shows they know they lied and are lying to cover the lie. Next week, another lie to cover the lie to cover the original lie. And on it goes.

philjourdansaid

kuhnkatsaid

Sorry, there are already reports that the regime knew this would happen over a year ago.

You have to start thinking about what they really intended with this. Destruction of our health care system and rioting with declaration of martial law or fast and expensive segue to single payer system and total control of a significant part of the economy? Other possibilities??

Jeff Idsaid

That is absolutely the intent, in the meantime we get to have new crises that politicians can “solve” in exchange for big government-money campaign funds laundered through all kinds of activists every single year. Looks like a win-win for the authoritarians of both parties.

How exactly is that any different from what we had in the US before Obamacare(less)? Now we will eliminate medical tourism for all but the most wealthy. And this will be considered a great advance by “R” and his ilk.

Brian Hsaid

Someone reported that one month in, by the end of Oct., just under 300 persons had managed to register for O-care. But according to McAfee, over 700 spoof registration sites had processed thousands who now think they are registered. Oops. Seems the system lacks even the most rudimentary security and anti-phishing protection.

page488said

A little background on me: I’ve carried Blue Cross health insurance my entire life. Except for a Cadillac BC policy that I had during a brief marriage in the nineties, and the subsequent three years of very expensive Cobra, all of my policies have been individual coverage of one sort or another because I’ve always been self-employed. I’ve never had to worry about pre-existing conditions because I’ve never allowed a lapse in my coverage (even through some pretty lean times, my health care coverage was my top priority).

As many of you probably know, the health care market has never been geared to the individual. Back in the seventies and eighties all I could get was hospitalization. I didn’t appreciate how good it was, at the time, because all my friends had more comprehensive policies through their employers. The policy was very simple: 100% hospitalization with no deductible, 100% ER coverage with a $100.00 deductible. Any test I had while hospitalized or in an ER was covered. I paid for all my own doctor bills including surgeons fees, lab and/or test fees incurred anywhere but in a hospital, and prescriptions, (Needless to say, I learned how to negotiate with surgeons on fees very early on.)

By the turn of the century, the policy was not nearly as good because, even though it was still structured the same way, tests were no longer done in hospitals and the length of hospital stays had declined markedly.

Believe it or not, Blue Cross started offering more comprehensive individual polices around the same time. I kept my old hospitalization policy as long as I could but, when I realized I was probably going to have to have some pretty extensive surgery a few years ago, I upgraded to a more comprehensive plan. It cost 3 times more, but it was ok – a standard 80/20 fee schedule, $25.00 deductible for regular doctors and $50.00 for specialists, $2500/yr deductible for tests and the big stuff and fairly decent prescription coverage.

It cost $293.00/month. According to Sebelius, it’s substandard (wink, wink), so the policy will be ending on 12/31/2013. (I just know they did this on purpose to force individuals into the Exchanges so some signees would be guaranteed)

I’ll now have to pay around $1200/month for the closest comparable (I make too much to join the subsidy crowd). The lowest priced policy available to me is around $475/mo, but the coverage is something like 60/40 and the deductible is so high as to make the split moot, anyway. I’m four years away from Medicare but so many docs are declining new Medicare patients that I’ll probably have to have something private (if anything exists) by then, anyway.

I’m thinking about going to all cash. For the first two years the penalties aren’t too bad (1% of taxable income first year and 2% the second). By then, the country is liable to be in such a mess there’s no point in trying to look that far ahead, anyway.

Gee, this has been wordy, but hope I’ve provided a little info for those who might be interested.

page488said

WhyNotsaid

First, businesses need to do one thing and one thing only, kick everyone off of the employee plan. Force all workers to go into the exchange on Dec 31, 2013. If enough businesses would ban together and do this, Obama’Scare would instantly collapse.

Second, why is no one mentioning that Obama’Scare is a form of a Ponzi scheme? Young healthy people must sign up (receive no health care benefits [receive no interest on premiums]) to pay for old sick people who require a lot of health care benefits (receive interest on premiums).

stansaid

Chuck Todd’s impression of his interview with Obama is that Obama does not believe he lied. Barack is seriously sick. I didn’t think it likely we would ever have a president quite as psychologically damaged as Bill Clinton, yet here we are. It’s not a good sign when the most powerful man in the world is so divorced from reality.

I think he absolutely knows he lied. Bill Clinton was pitiably pathological, he couldn’t tell the truth about eating fast food. A clear case of Pseudologia fantastica. Obama is perhaps a suffer of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or the like, but he is capable of telling the truth, he just chooses not to.

I going to dare say that Obama did NOT lie when he told everyone 33 times that “You can keep your plan.”
Remember when Pelosi said “We have to pass it to see what’s in it?”
Not a single Congressman read that bill before they passed it an certainly the President did not read it before he signed it.
Very possible that his liberal toadies never told him the truth about it.

kuhnkatsaid

If we accept your postulate then we have to accept tht all the people involved are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO STOOOOOOOOOOOOPID that they think you can increase coverage for most people without increasing the cost of the coverage or that they simply GUESSED that most people had coverage that would meet the REGULATIONS THAT WERE WRITTEN AFTER THE BILL PASSED!!!!!

Sorry, they had a good idea about two years ago what was going to happen and simply LIED THEIR WAY PAST THE ELECTION!!!!!

I have no doubt that almost every political person that supported Obamacare (including the cheerleaders in the MSM) knowing did not tell the truth about Obamacare.
But I am willing to believe that Obama himself is soooooooooooooooooo stoopid that he would believe what his toadie wonks told him.

timetochooseagainsaid

It’s entirely possible that Obama did not know every detail of the law, but he clearly knew about the grandfather clause which means he has to have know that as it was written it would cease to work as a result of routine changes in people’s premiums like the kind that simply occur because people get older. I can’t believe he didn’t know that the clause contained a five dollar threshold for something to be considered “the same plan.” I don’t know though, he might have been stupid enough to believe that the law would somehow make it so that insurance companies don’t need to increase premiums every year as actuarial tables tell them when you get older you are a higher risk. But I’m willing to give the President a little more credit to his intelligence than that. What are ya, some kinda racist? ;)

Kansaid

No, they were not. It was the plan. They just had to sell it. Unfortunately for us, they also knew they could not be charged with fraud. Dodd-Frank is silent about fraudlent government statements and products (see Fred and Fan).